Ted Kitchel has always maintained that the benchmark of his basketball career wasn’t Indiana’s 1981 NCAA championship team as many would think. Rather, it was playing a major role in Lewis Cass High School capturing its first IHSAA Sectional Basketball title in 1978.
Now, Kitchel has another honor that crowds in somewhere near the top of his list of accomplishments. It was announced Monday that he had joined 13 others as members of the 2009 class of the Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame.
Kitchel, standing alongside fellow IU basketball standouts Steve Alford, Wayne Radford and Steve Bouchie, will be inducted March 25 in Indianapolis.
“I’m not really sure where [the induction] fits in,” Kitchel said. “I don’t look at myself as a Hall of Fame guy. When I look at the Hall of Fame, I think of the absolute greats — John Wooden, Jimmy Rayl and George McGinnis. This is a great honor, but I don’t put myself in that category.”
Obviously many, including those who voted him into the Indiana University Hall of Fame in 1996, would disagree. He may in fact be the perfect prototype of an Indiana Basketball Hall of Fame inductee.
Kitchel grew up on a rural Cass County farm and honed his skills in what he described as a tool shed with a cement floor where a hoop was perched among the rafters. He said he still remembers the poor lighting, dirty basketball and near-choking fumes from an indoor heater used during cold weather.
“I was the true State Farm Insurance kid,” Kitchel said with a laugh, recalling the commercials the company aired before Indiana basketball broadcasts several years ago.
Those hours spent shooting paid off in championships at the highest levels.
Kitchel graduated from Cass in 1978 and remains today the school’s most famous alumni. In his senior season, he averaged 26.2 points and 13 rebounds in leading the Kings to a 20-0 record. That team continued on to win the school’s first single class sectional crown and Kitchel graduated as the program’s all-time leading scorer with 1,630 points.
Kitchel noted in a 2002 interview just how important that championship was in the lives of so many.
“That’s still by far my greatest basketball thrill – winning that sectional,” he said. “Of course you have to understand how big high school basketball was then and how important winning a sectional at Cass was. Everyone who was important in my life was there that day. People from big schools can’t understand how big of a deal it was — they’re used to winning. But in the history of the school we had never won a sectional. [The championship] wasn’t just for me, it was for the whole community.”
Those were special times for Kitchel, now 49.
“It wasn’t just my play [that led to the sectional title], we had an outstanding team and very good coaching,” he said. “[Jon] Kitchel, [Mark] Foreman, [Randy] Cotner [Randy] Hall and [Mark] Golden were such good players and I also had great parents who made sure my head didn’t get too big.”
Kitchel is the fourth player named to the Hall who graduated from what is now the Cass school system. Others were: Alva Staggs (Walton) 1966, Carl McNulty (Washington Township) in 1990 and Joe Platt (Young America) 1996.
Following his selection to the Indiana All-Stars, Kitchel took his talents to Indiana University where he played on legendary teams — for legendary coach Bob Knight.
The 6-foot-7 forward is one of a handful of players ever to achieve such lofty personal and team honors in college basketball. Kitchel played for three Big Ten championship teams, earning first team all-conference and All-American honors in 1982 and 1983. He was also a starter for IU’s 1981 NCAA championship squad that dominated the tournament with a remarkable winning margin of 23-points per game.
An outstanding perimeter shooter and tireless worker, Kitchel averaged 19.6 points per game as a junior and 17.3 ppg. as a senior while battling a back injury. His career-high scoring performance of 40 points came against Illinois and he closed his career with 1,336 points.
“I was very fortunate and I have no regrets,” Kitchel said. “If anything, I wish I would dreamed a little higher in high school — we should have won that regional. At IU, I played on great teams and learned to win. Coach [Bob] Knight taught me about expectations and preparations. He taught me so much off the court that I was able to use on the court.”
Kitchel and his wife Kristi live in Greenwood. They are the parents of Scott (22), Tyler (20) and Mackenzie (14).
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HALL of FAME: Ted Kitchel
He left mark of a champion at Cass, IU
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